Apply Credit To Invoice Before It Is Sent

[mrrsm]

I am curious if I am able to apply a credit to an invoice before the invoice is sent to the customer?

 

This only came up because in a previous system I created an estimate for some work for a customer and received a partial payment.  When I moved this to blesta I credited them with that partial payment.  When I sent the final invoice I would want it to show that credit applied to that invoice. This would then show the subtotal, credit, and total at the bottom of the invoice.

[flangefrog]

I've done some testing and it seems that usually the credit is applied to an invoice before it gets sent out, but occasionally it's not. Could someone clarify this?

[Tyson]

Credits are applied automatically before invoices are delivered via cron, but your Automation settings for how often the credits task and invoice delivery tasks should run might affect this. For example, if credits are applied once every 30 minutes, but invoices are delivered every 5 minutes, then some invoices (at 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 minutes) may be delivered before credits are applied.

[mrrsm]

Everything I have that has an interval (sans Exchange Rate update) has an update time of 5 min.

 

In my situation I created an invoice and had the date Billed set to Tomorrow.  I was unable to set that credit (earmark it for example) to the invoice because it did not yet actually exist as an invoice yet.  When the invoice was sent it did not have the credit applied on the pdf version although the credit was applied sometime after because it did have the credit when I logged in to check it in the afternoon after it was emailed to the client.

[Tyson]

If you waited for the invoice to exist before applying a credit, then that may be why it did not apply a credit before it was delivered.

 

Invoices that get automatically created by cron also get automatically delivered at the same time. So if you wanted a credit to be attached to it, the credit would need to have already been available on the client's account.

[mrrsm]

That makes some sense to me, I would like to verify my understanding though.

 

If I create an invoice right now and set the billed date to tomorrow.  

Next I add a credit to the account.

 

Tomorrow comes and the cron runs.

 

Would the credit be applied before or after the invoice is sent out in this case?

What if I created the credit before the invoice?

[Tyson]

Assuming you have no other open invoices on the account in the currency of the credit, then the answer to the first question is 'before'. If you create a credit before the invoice is sent, the credit remains on the account until open invoices exist for which to apply it to.

 

You can think of the credit as waiting to be applied to the first open invoice(s), and as soon as an unpaid invoice exists, the credit will be applied.

 

As for the cron, it will first create invoices if necessary, apply any credits to those invoices, and then deliver the invoices to the customer.

[flangefrog]

mrrsm, I think the problem you're experiencing is that PDF invoices don't currently show partial payment. I found a couple of feature requests here.

http://www.blesta.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1944-invoice-list-partial-payments/

http://www.blesta.com/forums/index.php?/topic/1336-show-credits-payments-on-invoice-pdfs/

 

I did some testing and if there was enough credit to fully pay the invoice before I created it, then it was always paid before sending out.

[mrrsm]

Tyson, thanks for explaining that. flangefrog hit the nail on the head though.  That was what I was expecting as I have seen the invoices say paid in the past when there was a credit that covered the amount.  I may have to bump the credit on the invoice feature request.